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Got all that? If not, don't worry: Just watch Miike's film and revel in the serpentine progress of this now-iconic story. This back-and-forth exchange between Eastern and Western culture is at the heart of Sukiyaki Western Django, maybe the most fascinating genre pastiche since Kill Bill. Wearing its fakeness on its sleeve, the film works as both a deliciously entertaining cult readymade and as a two-hour thinkpiece on the permeability of culture.
It is foremost a cult object. Miike assumes a familiarity with the cinematic history noted above as well as some basic tenets of spaghetti Westerns. When a character warns the nameless gunman essayed by Hideaki Ito against playing Yojimbo, it's an obvious resonation; when another character whips a weapon out of a casket, the reference gets a tad more obscure. Yet it's in this space between the film Miike's making and the films that led to it that the fun resides. For one thing, Miike shifts the timeframe to the Genpei Wars, so that the cultural exchange gains an extra historical echo; one character further blurs the lines by demanding to be renamed Henry, after Shakespeare's Henry VI. Another character, too old to make himself understood, has an English-language translator who follows him around. There's even a bullet-curving scene that nails that perfect collision of cool and ridiculous that Wanted whiffed by a country mile. There's plenty of silly to go around, and the falseness could get grating if Miike wasn't so keen to let us in on the joke.
The artificial nature of the film is indeed deliberate, a fact that becomes obvious several seconds into the film when a gang of Japanese men advance on a cameoing Quentin Tarantino and begin threatening him in stilted phonetic English. Tarantino handily dispatches the attackers, spraying blood all over the painted backdrop. It's that kind of movie. Tarantino's character Ringo shows up later as a deus ex machina of sorts, but his presence in the opening sets the prevailing tone of "low" culture taken seriously. Miike and Tarantino are kindred spirits, both in their treatment of "shabby" material and in their use of pacing, meting out Cool Moments in between long stretches of downtime across the length of their distended running times; if one were to boil down Sukiyaki Western Django to quick-pitch level, it would come out like Tarantino filters Leone through Brecht.
And yet, this is still demonstrably a Miike film. His imprint is all across this like smudged fingerprints -- nobody else could have crafted this hybrid of gonzo conceptual goofiness, hyperbolic violence and unexpected quietude. It's that last part, for me, that defines the man as an auteur; the delirious joy he takes in blowing apart taboos is what got him noticed by the Asian-cult crowd, but what holds fast through his oeuvre is a melancholic desire within his protagonists for peace and/or acceptance. Sukiyaki Western Django is a film where splattery violence involving Gatling guns and arrows through torsos can rest comfortably besides a moving scene where a woman writhes out an interpretive dance to the mournful beat of a didgeridoo and where a blackly comedic death via samurai sword becomes sad and absurd through the simple use of a mistimed clap.
It could be said that Miike was always going to make this film some day. Several of his films (most notably the opening scene of The City of Lost Souls) have bespoken a love for Leone, and the yakuza genre upon which he made his bones shares a number of points of contact with the spaghetti Western genre. And while he captures the grand, dizzying insanity of the best spaghetti Westerns, he also takes a minute during the climactic showdown to nod in the direction of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the most depressing Western ever made. Miike's films generally attempt difficult balancing acts with variable success. With Sukiyaki Western Django, he's nailed it damn near perfect.
- Steve Carlson (0 comments)